A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.

Monday, 18 April 2016

Good writing, bad writing...how about the problem of 'over writing'?

Hey, in primary schools, there are criteria for 'good writing' and either by default or design there are criteria for 'bad writing'. So how about criteria for 'over writing'?

This would include the insertion of too many adjectives into 'expanded noun phrases', random 'fronting' of 'adverbials' for no obvious reason, and random 'embedding' of relative clauses for no obvious reason.

The 'punishment' would be for the school to package up the sentences and send them to Nick Gibb and Nicky Morgan with a note on it saying, 'This is the silly nonsense that you make our children write. Without these artificial criteria, there is every chance they would write well if we had the time to stimulate them in the ways that we know well.'